Here's an early interview conducted for Record Mirror on the eve of the start of the 'Touring Principle'. At this point, Record Mirror were largely sympathetic towards the man and his music... a position that turned somewhat in the years that followed.
A brisk jaunt from the Broadway station, along High Street, Ealing, and Beggar’s Banquet lies before a new car-park site, down the road from Crists and War On Want. Further on is The Park – not necessarily that Park, but it’s called The Park nevertheless.
Come early, early evening, Ealing is a quiet, blank place. Pubs don’t open until seven on Sundays, but that’s when it happens. That’s when the can gets kicked through the streets until the frustrated constables feel inclined to intrude, and that’s when the Safeways trolleys get sprung loose. Ealing is a strict boozer territory, 10 pints of Fullers a night and ripped-off burgers from Crusts.
In Beggar’s Banquet, Gary Numan is playing ‘The Lodger’ and fiddling with a TV control unit. He’s relaxed, smiling, perfectly affable and he tells me that he knows someone with a control unit that even controls the treble and bass on the set. Gary Numan is not the inverted Alien I’d perhaps anticipated, and I disregard the multitude of delving technological questions I’ve equipped myself with.
Numan happens to be a genuine nice-gut who confines himself to the shade through lack of trust and security; it’s “paranoia” In his own words. He’s trapped between two poles. I feel influenced and motivated by the rock ‘n’ roll sparkle, the flash of a Hank Marvin guitar on sixties TV, entranced by the breadth of Bowie and Burroughs; he relishes his success, but at the same time feels inclined to withdraw from the limelight which that success naturally bestows.
It’s obvious when we parade down the local burger pit for a take-away that Numan is uncomfortable; all heads turn in his direction and he’s swift to make a retreat.. Later he explains, though his music is sufficient to suggest a recluse character – Gary Numan of ‘Replicas’ is more a breed of Real-Life-Gary-Numan-Alter-Ego than anything else.
But we're back at Beggar's and he starts by explaining his exploits pre-Tubeway Army ...
"The only relevant stage, I suppose, was leaving school around ‘73, and working. First thing I did was about two and a half weeks putting air conditioning in - had to give that up 'cause it meant real hard work in basements… with freezing water coming down, walking round in ice particles. I got pinned against a wall by a big giant tube, the main air-conditioning tube ... and that was it.
I ran home "that day and never went back. And after that, it was mainly air-freight for two years, working as an import clerk.
"I think the first time I got interested by music was when I was four, and I saw Hank Marvin. It wasn't the musical side - just the look of the guitar, flashing in the light."
THEN there was a band. Numan and his current bass player were part of an outfit which eventually evolved into Mean Street, before-which Numan was slung out. There was Tubeway Army, initially pubescent-punk mainstream, until Kraftwerk, Bowie and, in particular, Ultravox made their respective marks. Tubeway Army's last live performance was in early 1978, an Acton White Hart gig shared with The Skids.
"There was always that thing about Hank Marvin's guitar," enthuses the.passive interviewee, "the knobs and gadgets - I found that fascinating. But I was starting to get fed up with-guitars, being through the Punk thing and realizing it wasn't going anywhere. It wasn't changing, wasn't getting any better ... and I couldn't write songs on guitar anymore - it was boring; I realised there was nothing you could do that hadn't gone before. And then I saw Ultravox. I became aware of the depths you could get, the changes you could put them through - like a dozen instruments rolled into one… they were like toys."
There's some foundation to the comparisons people have made with Bowie and Ultravox?
"Yeah; a certain amount – but no-one mentioned Ultravox 'till I mentioned them in interviews. So when I see things like that now I lose interest in their opinions."
Why did you drop the Tubeway Army monicker and revert to Gary Numan?
" Well... I wanted it to be Gary Numan before the first album, really, but Nick and Martin from Beggar's wouldn't let me because of the comparatively good little following we had then. But really, when you read what the press have said about it, it's obvious to them that it's not a group effort.. I can't work with other people - their ideas and mine are always separate - I like to be in control. So I'm lucky to be in this position."
'Replicas' was where things began to gel: it was part-successful world of science, alienation, soli tary figures in dark, dull rooms. It was Numan's highly, vaguely, personalised feelings locked in a different context - impenetrable, futuristic ideas provoking charges of almost-justified pretentiousness. But alI he'd done was to approach the album as Ballard approaches a novel; his imagination had produced a living, breathing society of the future, indirectly born through today's possibilities and realities ...
"I wouldn't have thought it was difficult to understand but apparently most people seem to have trouble with the lyrics… but, anyway, I've always seen machines as being . powerful and cold - and, for me, the only way to be successful is to be cold. And the successful nations have always been essentially cold - the Romans and the Germans. I don't think I'd ever enjoy being that, but - Gord, look at that!" he beams, wheeling his gaze round in the direction of the TV screen'. "Gord ... I love Grand Prix.
"Aw, sorry … I was saying, I don't think it's too far away from the stage where they'll be constructing a machine which is superior to us ... but the 'Replicas' thing wasn't about machines taking over, destroying us - well, it may be in a sense, but the thing I was thinking about when I wrote it was that machines wouldn't need to take over, since we'd g.t rid of ourselves. Because they were doing everything we wouldn't need to work. The unity's going ... there's total lack of unity. The terraced houses are disappearing, the neighbours don't talk anymore…”
I enquire as to whether The Park was hemmed into 'Replicas' as a pure escapist alternative to his mechanised society.
"The Park? Aw, The Park is simply something very frightning. I don't walk alone in parks anymore at night, I don't think many people do. I saw this programme about Central Park - they were saying 'All this violence thing is completely overblown' and in the background there all these sirens going - it was stupid, I just couldn't believe it. They were saying how you don't get drug smuggling there, and they were actually dealing right out in the open. It really does happen."
Numan's writing process – which generally involves taking a particular line from, say, Burroughs, then converting and writing around it before disgarding the original line - is obviously more heavyly connected with an authoristic approach than with standard rock lyricism.
"Replicas', the album sleeve – the main part of it where I'm standing by the window - represents a Machman. Really, the album's all about ... well, I was writing a book, which I dropped because I'm better with short stories… but I'd started with an attempt at what London would be like in 10 or 20 years and what happened was that the Government made a machine which made all the decisions - like a dictator - but the people weren't allowed to find out.
"The machine decided that the only thing holding back the State was the people themselves, so they decided to stage a quota test under the pretence that if you weren't up to quota-standard, you were taken and re-educated. Where, in fact, you were simply got rid of.
"The people who sat the quota test were the Crazies, the' people who set it were the Grey Men, and people collecting the ones who'd failed the test… were The Machmen, who were used as a special police force. The cover is a Machman looking through a window at a friend, and ‘Are Friends Electric?' is about friends…"
It seems to suggest the loss of friends.
"I wrote it because I lost friends when I was younger: I didn't lose them so much as·them getting rid of me. Which bothered me quite a lot because it was unnecessary… like getting thrown out of Mean Street ..."
"A lot of the songs are about friends - losing me girl at one time."
So do you feel alienated?
"I suppose that's the case. I can say I don't like mixing with people one day, and it'll be completely true. Another day it might be different, but there are days,I can't go out and walk down the street. Doing what we did then, going to Crusts, I get nervous doing that. It's only 'cause there were four of us that it was OK – but I wouldn't do it on me own. It's not that I feel I don't fit in, so much as I stand out - and it's not so much egotistical as· paranoid.
"Things have happened that way as I've grown up, since my mid-teens, initially because deliberately, I wanted to be very different… and since , because other things have happened, emotionally or otherwise. Like, I may grow out of it - I may . not. I may I commit suicide or I may, one day, be completely alright. I don't really enjoy being like it any more. I did at one time, when I thought I was really different, but now ... "
Were the songs written in this particular frame of mind?
"Most of them are concerned with me, or me putting myself into another place - and perhaps how I’d react in that situation. The songs still are that way. They're still about me - not me as me - but me as a figure, a kind of underground figure which 'is always there, always ominous.”
BZZZZ Click. The tape recorder has been observing us. It is promptly switched off and stashed away and 'The Pleasure Principle' is played. Written post-'Replicas', its studio completion coincided with Are Friends Electric's first week at number one. Numan is pleased with the result: it represents perhaps his most stable, professional recordings to date, still very much in the mould, but with a face-life.
Numan isn't exactly gambling with 'The Pleasure Principle', he's not treading tight-ropes and he's not. staring commercial disaster in the face. Merely, he's sticking limpet-tight to his little box and improving what he's got. He enthuses about the Polymoogs he's acquired and employed - £1,500 a shot - and eagerly points to their role in the scheme of things as the music progresses.
He explains away the arsenal of visual effects he'll be touring with - robots, computerised newsreader, the works. At this stage - the tour is already guaranteed a 25 grand loss, and no-one seems to be too worried by it all.
Numan is as personally un-stable as he is financially stable. But for all the cold, distant exterior, for all the inverted complexities of-his music, the little recluse has something. There's no way his work can be branded "emotionless" - it's just powered by emotions of a very personal, inhibited nature; it never contrives to be anything it isn't.' There's another level, too, and the one which looks like rooting Numan at the top of the tree for some while yet: he's producing some of the most optimistic, forward-facing Pop of the seventies, no matter what you may design to throw in his direction. He may be as irrelevant as you wish him to be, but Gary Numan's time seems to have come.
As I prepare to embark on my brisk jaunt to the Broadway Station, along the High Street, he invites me to turn up at rehearsals and investigate the great delicacies of his Polymoogs. If there's one way to a poor critic's heart ...